Friday, December 23, 2011

Screwing Mother Nature For Profit: How Corporations Betray Our Trust - And Why the New Biology Offers an Ethical and Sustainable Future

Screwing Mother Nature For Profit: How Corporations Betray Our Trust - And Why the New Biology Offers an Ethical and Sustainable Future

Elaine Smitha

Watkins, Oct 4 2011, $19.95

ISBN: 9781780280189

Screwing Mother Nature for Profit comes out swinging from the onset with the opening chapter of a Planetary Crisis: Gambling Our Future as Elaine Smitha pulls no punches and never stops throwing hooks at the government industrial complex. The author uses powerful anecdotal examples like the BP spill to make her case that the world is being murdered by industry. Her first entry in New Guinea is a stunner while the insidious use of designer seeds to control the food supply is shocking. The destruction of the rain forests and wetlands under the guise of progress lead to man worsening horrific storms like Katrina; recent flooding in the Atlanta area shows what one county Clayton did with wetlands to lessen the impact. Ms. Smitha completes her treatise with an argument that going green to save the planet means also going bottom line black. The author’s contends that businesses are a form of a living system (not the activist Supreme Court definition of corporations are people); as such Ms. Smitha claims the business model needs to change from Screwing Mother Nature For Profit to the New Biology Ethical and Sustainable Future concept. With a nod to Rachel Caron’s still relevant The Silent Spring, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and James Cameron’s Avatar, Ms. Smitha makes a case that we still have time to save the planet and create those green jobs. This is a well written cautionary yet hopeful commentary on changing the business model paradigm to the betterment of the world.